


The Summer Side of Life

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776
Genre: Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Family, Memory Magic, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-14 20:06:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3423851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They exist in a space defined by everything she does not remember and everything he cannot allow himself to forget.  A late-blooming romance between two old companions in a quiet village by the sea... and yet also the story of an archer-goddess and an ordinary boy who fell in love at first sight, long ago and far away.  Bridget, Finn, Bridget's other self, and the fabrication of a heroic age.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beautiful

**The Summer Side of Life**

_Prologue (777)_

“Well, that’s done,” reported Dagdar as he and Marty returned from the dungeons. “Can’t believe we left him breathin’ but I s’pose he can’t hurt anyone now.”

“I’d say locking Veld up in the darkest cell beneath Manster is exactly what he deserves,” Eyvel said with a smile. “I’m proud of Lord Leif for deciding to spare such a pathetic creature.”

Dadgar shook his head. He hadn’t sounded convinced by his own claim that Veld was now harmless and he now looked even less sure of it.

“You can say that, Eyvel, because you’re here with us to say it. If that odd little girl hadn’t been able to bring you back, I don’t know the prince would’ve been so merciful.”

Eyvel had no ready response to this. She had little sense yet of the burden of the missing year that for her had been a flicker in time, a moment of disorientation. Lacking the words to give Dadgar any comfort, she instead patted him on the shoulder. The reassurance of her touch, the physical reality of her warm and living form, drew a smile out of him.

“What did you do with the puppet of Raydrik?” Eyvel then asked, for none of them knew what to make of the _thing_ that bore Raydrik’s features.

“Gave it to the mages to study along with the other five,” Dadgar replied. “Finn stayed with them to look it over. Said he’d read of something like it bein’ used for battle back in the Dark Ages.”

For all that Eyvel wanted to speak with Dadgar of happy things— of Tanya’s small hand held fast inside Orsin’s strong one, of the better days that awaited them both in Fiana and the mountains— a vein of morbid curiosity drove her back towards Manster’s throne room, now littered with remains of Veld’s _puppets_. As Dagdar reported, a small crowd of mages hovered over the Raydrik-puppet, but Finn was no longer in their company.

“Asvel?” she said to the youth who was on his knees studying one of the puppet’s ruined hands; Eyvel thought she recognized him from a brief encounter the year before and felt certain enough she was addressing him by the right name.

“Yes, Miss Eyvel?” He looked up at her with a bright-eyed smile that made an unsettling contrast with the lifeless thing there on the floor.

“Did Finn say where he was headed to?”

“The library, ma’am!”

Eyvel was content to leave Asvel and his companions to their very nasty work. Halfway to the library it struck her that Finn had actually been in charge of Asvel for several years, had raised the exuberant little mage alongside Prince Leif and Lady Nanna. Eyvel wondered what mischief she’d missed by not having Asvel in Fiana with the other children— not in the sense of being sorry for it, exactly, but she reflected for a moment on how things would have been _different_.

* * *

 

 Once Eyvel set foot in Manster’s royal library she had to wonder if Finn were thinking clearly. This high-ceilinged chamber must surely have a thousand books and as many scrolls lining its walls; did Finn hope to uncover the secret of Veld’s puppets in one evening?

“Finn, what exactly are you looking for?” she called up, for she found him standing on a chair, scanning one of the upper shelves in a corner of the library stuffed with tomes like _Hypnerotomachia_ and _The Labyrinth of Aedificium_. The very titles made Eyvel’s head spin a little though these books, at least, didn’t seem evil the way that the tome they’d confiscated from Veld just felt malevolent.

“Back in the time of Prince Quan’s grandfather, the royal family of Leonster gave the king of Manster a volume of Crusader Bragi’s writings,” Finn said as he stepped back down to solid ground— empty-handed. “Prince Quan let me accompany him on a visit here once and when I showed an interest in the book I was allowed to borrow it for a single day. One section covered the creation and use of the Deadlords by the Loptyrian emperors.”

“Deadlords?” Eyvel felt a ripple go down her neck, almost as though someone’d trailed a feather dipped in cold water along her spine. “You mean the puppets?”

“Yes. I’m certain that’s what Raydrik became in the end. The Deadlords of the Empire were great warriors and sages, corrupted into something neither living nor truly dead. They kept their intellect and skill but existed beyond fear or any other emotion, beyond the need for sleep or food or any other…”

“Desire?”

“Yes. They were perfect servants to the Empire.”

“I can’t imagine Raydrik being a perfect anything, living or dead. Or neither,” Eyvel said, and something within her wanted almost desperately to get away from the subject. “You almost sound like you admire something in them, Finn.”

“No, of course not. It’s a dreadful idea,” he replied. “But I was very young when I read about them, and I suppose it did capture my imagination, as terrible stories do…”

“If those things down on the floor in the throne room are the great and terrible Deadlords, I can’t say they’re measuring up to their own myth,” Eyvel said, but in spite of her visceral distaste for the topic she now had the impulse to laugh at Finn for making a run on the library when they ought to have been celebrating. “You can search for this book later, Finn. You look so tired right now it’s no wonder you envy the Deadlords.”

“I don’t envy—”

“Maybe not envy, but there truly is a streak of romance in you I hadn’t noticed before. First that talk about the golden-haired goddess of Lord Sigurd’s army and now this.”

“Have you been thinking of what I said to you yesterday?” he asked, his tone a little too even, a little too dispassionate. As though nothing in the world could possibly hinge on her answer.

They regarded one another for a moment, there in the stillness of the library with its scent of dust and leather and _time_. Neither of them was at their best, Eyvel realized, in spite of the joy and relief of victory over Veld and his Deadlords. She felt more out of sorts with each passing hour, as though her body felt the strain of the year she’d spent encased in stone but her mind hadn’t caught up to the idea yet. As for Finn, he’d cut a more respectable figure in rustic Fiana than he did now; his face was thinner than she remembered, he’d let his hair get long enough to be untidy, and his coat was more threadbare than ever she’d seen it.

“Yes,” she said. She’d meant to bring it up at a more pleasant hour, perhaps over a late supper and a cup or two of ale “liberated” from Raydrik’s storeroom of luxuries. But since he’d asked…

“Mm?” Again, he tried to sound like it was something of no great consequence, but Eyvel saw a glimmer of something in Finn’s eyes then that she didn’t quite recognize.

“When you compared me to Bridget... you called her ‘beautiful.’ Twice. Were you trying to say, then...”

 _That I am beautiful_. Unspoken, yet perfectly clear in its meaning. The question hung there for a moment, but Eyvel felt no real tension as she waited, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She felt she knew exactly what Finn might say— a retreat into polite phrases asking her pardon for the offense. A dodge. A denial that wasn’t even a real denial.

“Yes,” he replied. “I suppose I was.”

“Oh.” She knew how to handle a compliment from Dadgar, who offered them with an intent as simple and pure as sunlight. But Finn… she’d called him _honorable_ and meant it truly, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t complicated. Eyvel didn’t enjoy being wrong about people.

“Could we talk of this later?” Finn asked now, his voice pitched low and his eyes averted, all his usual defenses snapping back into place.

“I don’t know what you’d consider later, but I was planning to leave for Fiana as soon as possible,” she said.

“So we’ll talk of this later.” This time it wasn’t a question.

“It’s a conversation we’ll have in Fiana, then?” Eyvel let go the idea of a midnight supper with friends, or at least with this particular friend. She wondered now where Dadgar might be at that hour.

“Yes. I’ll see you in Fiana,” he agreed.

“I’ll be waiting.”

Prince Leif promised her a visit as well, and so Eyvel expected that one fine day the young liberator of Thracia would show up at her village gates, accompanied by his faithful knight, and they’d continue the conversation that’d barely begun there in Manster.

Six years passed, and still she waited.

**To Be Continued...**


	2. Sundown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eyvel receives a long-overdue visitor.

_Chapter One (783)_

Eyvel was turning the fish on the grill when Tanya’s eldest came running to her with the word that a man on horseback was outside the gates of Fiana.

“Mama said you need to come out, Miss Eyvel,” said Olly, but his wide excited smile let Eyvel know it wasn’t any crisis that demanded the use of her blade. Eyvel took the sword along anyway; after one final check on the fish she let Olly lead her outside the village.

“Look who’s back, Miss Eyvel,” Tanya said as she somehow managed to juggle all three of the younger children.

At first she though his hair had gone entirely white. As Finn walked his horse toward her Eyvel realized it was a trick of the light, that the long strands falling into his eyes only looked transparent when backlit by the sun. She was strangely relieved that the vibrant blue color that made Finn unmistakable at a distance wasn’t much dimmed by the years.

“You’re right in time for supper,” she called to him, and yet his steps became more hesitant, more cautious.

“Should I not ask permission to enter your village?”

After all, he never _had_. He’d remember something like that.

“Not at all.” She waited for him, arms crossed casually, sword untouched at her belt, smiling at his oddities. “Fiana always welcomes a traveler.”

* * *

 The fish was only a little past perfect by the time she had the horse tied up outside and Finn settled at her table. She’d made a mess of wild greens to go with the pink flaked fish and opened one of the bottles of wine Dadgar sent down from the mountains, wine made from the first harvest of vines that’d borne fruit after long years of struggle. They ate in near silence, without the rote courtesies expected of a hostess and her guest. Eyvel finished first and rose from the table to arrange some soft cheese and berries on a plate for dessert.

“I’ll put on some water for coffee,” she said.

“Chicory?”

“Yes, of course.” She glanced over her shoulder in time to catch a brief knowing smile, and though his lips were burnt by the wind and the sun it was an appealing smile.

Eyvel set water on to boil and began to look through her cupboards for two stoneware mugs splashed with glaze in sky-blue and marigold-orange, a gift from the children on that last happy holiday before Raydrik brought the war to Fiana. The contented silence lasted just until the water came to a rolling boil.

“Is Mareeta well?”

“She’s gone off to make a name for herself, but she passes through every few months to let me know she’s doing just fine.” She poured the boiling water over the chicory powder. “As opposed to someone else I know. I’d complain that you’ve kept me waiting except it sounds that I’m hardly alone there.”

Silence again, though far less content. Eyvel thought she could hear the water seeping through the chicory grounds.

“Now, King Leif kept his promise to me more than two years ago when he came to visit,” she added, “He mentioned you’d gone off to parts unknown and never sent word back.”

Finn had gone still, his hands folded in front on him on the table, the cheese and berries sitting untouched before him. Eyvel studied him while she waited for the “coffee” to brew. His pale hands and sun-darkened face might have belonged to two different owners, and the curious thing the sun had done to his hair reminded Eyvel of the time Mareeta, envious of Nanna’s golden locks, bought some potion from a peddler that turned the ends of her hair to pale-green while the roots stayed raven-dark. She wondered where on earth he’d been with so harsh a sun.

“His Majesty passed through here again seven months ago and brought Queen Nanna and the baby,” Eyvel said as she poured the coffee into the pair of mugs. “I had the joy of watching Thracia’s princess playing with Tanya’s brood here in my own home, around this very table.”

She set the mugs on the table. He did not reach for the blue one that’d been his.

“I asked after you then, too. Their Majesties didn’t know, and I could tell that they dreaded not knowing. They had the exact same look in their eyes, one mirroring the other.” This didn’t bring a response from him, either, and so Eyvel switched tactics. “Have you even laid eyes on your granddaughter?”

“No.” She thought he was staring entirely too hard at the swirls of steam rising out of the coffee. “I only know her name. Althea…”

“She’s a lovely little thing. Golden hair and big dark eyes.”

He looked up at her then, and spoke with a telltale catch in his voice.

“Eyvel, you know I’m not truly her--”

“In every way that matters, you _are_. Let’s not hear any more of that.” He’d shown some remorse for making the children unhappy, and that was enough for the moment. “Well, I don’t think you came here to be scolded.”

“Mm.” He’d taken up the mug in both hands, using it as a defensive shield against her words.

They sat there for another spell of silence as Eyvel drank her coffee and Finn mostly used his mug as a hand-warmer. A beam of rosy sunlight crept down the kitchen wall and vanished as the day ended.

“Well?”

“I came here because I am ready to talk with you,” he said, setting down the mug at last.

“About what?”

“Everything. In its own time.”

Eyvel plucked a blackberry from the plate, scraped a bit of cheese onto it, and mulled over the nature of “everything.” The cheese was bland and the blackberry almost too ripe, but they tasted fine together.

“It sounds like you’re planning to stay for a while,” she said. 

“If you’ll allow me.”

“If I’ll have you?” She had to laugh at this, just a little. “Yes. Of course, Finn. Believe it or not, I got accustomed to having you here.”

“Allow me to wash up,” he said, and so abandoned any pretense that he was a traveler receiving her hospitality.

“The dishcloth’s where it’s always been,” Eyvel said, and she sat back enjoying the cheese and berries while Finn dealt with the fish scraps and the rest of the dishes.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fiana was a poor rural place when Leif was hiding there, and while it's still isolated and the opposite of cosmopolitan (like the lack of actual coffee) I assume from Dadgar's character ending in FE5 that farmers in the region are having more luck with crops. Life is simple but not as harsh as it once was.


	3. Too Many Clues In This Room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They begin to discuss "everything" and in short order Eyvel learns more than she cares to know. But she still hasn't learned very much at all.

Once the dishes were dried and put away she helped Finn stable his horse for the night. The village owned a pair of workhorses now and Eyvel fed some treats to Maggie and Rose while Finn brushed down his mount.

“Is that really Thornapple?” Eyvel said of the chestnut mare with one white foot and a triangle-shaped blaze.

“Yes. I haven’t kept her with me for all this time, but we do keep encountering one another. This time I purchased her from a trader in Melgen who claimed she’d belonged to a great hero during the Crusades.”

“I take it the trader had no idea who you were,” Eyvel said through a smile.

Finn shook his head, but Eyvel thought he was more amused than dismayed by the truth inside the horse-trader’s falsehood. She hoped so, anyway.

* * *

 

“So I had the guest room improved a little since last you saw it.”

The fur coverlet on the bed was a gift from King Leif and the silver-backed mirror on the wall came from the grateful citizens of the coastal towns. The room now did resemble a respectable place for travelers and not the sanctuary of a fifteen-year-old boy. Finn said it was quite nice but of course he would never say otherwise and so they got along with unpacking his few pieces of luggage. It turned out that Finn had a few treasures tucked away among his clothes; Eyvel unfolded one shirt only to find a tiny sachet of velvet tied with a silver string, heavy for its size. She ran her fingers over its surface and thought it might be filled with pearls or precious stones, but on impulse she undid the string and a warm, rich fragrance rose up from the bag.

“Real coffee?”

“Real coffee,” he affirmed, and they agreed the morning would be a fine time to try it.

Inside another shirt were a few rough lumps of what looked like pale-green glass.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand these,” Eyvel said as she held the strange objects to the candlelight.

“In parts of the Yied, green glass like this lies scattered on the sand, covered and revealed again by the winds. The story I learned was that in the First Crusade, the power of Mjölnir and Valflame melted the sands and Forseti’s gale scattered the molten droplets for many miles.”

“Sounds like a battle for the ages.” Eyvel closed her eyes for a moment and tried to imagine so terrible an inferno.

“I never did see all three tomes used in a single battle, and so I can’t say whether that tale holds up… but I can’t consider it impossible.” Finn took back the lumps of glass, set the largest of the three atop the chest of drawers as an ornament and slipped the others in a hiding place that Eyvel didn’t find at all surprising.

“You still keep precious things with your socks?”

“It’s worked thus far,” he said.

“But if anyone knew well your habits, they’d know to search your socks.”

“Then it’s fortunate no one else knows me that well,” he said and shut the drawer. He sounded so unconcerned by it that she was left unsettled for a moment.

The last and smallest piece of Finn’s luggage held nothing but what felt like a bundle of cloth wrapped in scarlet tissue that bore a gilded stamp, the seal of a foreign city.

“All the way from Darna! Well, that settles it… between Yied and the Holy City, you must’ve been on a pilgrimage these past three years.” That explained the fierce sun, in any event. Unrelenting sun and scouring wind and bone-chilling cold through the night….

“It hardly takes three years to make a pilgrimage to Darna,” he replied, and took the bundle from her and placed it in the chest at the foot of the bed.

Eyvel thought about pointing out that she’d never been west of Manster and so didn’t know how long it might or might not cost to make the trek through the desert, but then she remembered that she _ought_ to have known how long it would take to cross the Yied. Queen Nanna’s mother Raquesis had, after all, gone on a trip of a few months’ duration that lasted forever.

The silence between them no longer felt comfortable. Eyvel picked up the remaining piece of desert glass and began to turn it over in her fingers. It was cool to the touch, like a tumbled bit of glass upon the seashore, but felt different somehow. She felt its age, perhaps. It might well have been a relic of the First Crusade.

“So you never did find the shrine beneath the desert sands filled with the captives of Lord Sigurd’s war?”

She wondered if so specific a question might get her another of his evasions. Finn, the last of his belongings put away, sat on the very edge of the bed and looked up at her with eyes as candid as she’d ever known them to be. _Naked honesty_ , she thought, and in his piercing blue eyes that expression was cold and bleak, not the warm light of a truth revealed. Well, Finn had said he planned to share everything…

“No. I don’t believe it ever existed. I think it was a piece of misdirection.”

“Really? August said to Lord Leif that I was likely to end up there as a decoration.” To emphasize _decoration_ , Eyvel set the desert glass back on the polished wood of the chest with a satisfying _click_.

“So he did. We learned afterward from Veld that wasn’t the plan at all.”

“Do tell.”

“Manfroy recognized your value as a warrior and wished to make use of it.”

Eyvel felt a rising tension in her breast and part of her wanted to make the instinctive denial that never in a thousand years would she have served the Loptyr cultists, but of course that wasn’t what Finn meant. The truth was far worse than any mere betrayal.

“They would have crafted you into a Deadlord.”

“Quite an honor.”

“Manfroy planned the same for Galzus, if the opportunity did present itself,” Finn continued, and Eyvel narrowed her eyes at the idea of Mareeta’s natural father being converted into one of the infernal puppets. “He would have inflicted such a fate even upon his own granddaughter.”

“Sara?” Now Eyvel flinched at Manfroy’s depravity; how could any man, however twisted, do something so foul to a child? “I owe more to that poor girl than I ever knew.”

“We all do.”

In the thoroughly unpleasant silence that followed, Eyvel found herself reaching again for the lump of green glass. Whether forged by magic or not, it did have a fascination, she admitted to herself.

“Let’s have some tea before we end the night,” she said, still clutching the glass, her words unconvincingly bright, and Finn only nodded in response.

* * *

 

Light and sour tea made from three types of red berries made a good refreshment on a summer evening. They sat outside beneath the brightening stars and Eyvel was soon relaxed again, even humming to herself. The threat of what Manfroy wanted and never achieved seemed far from her now. As for Finn, rather than falling into the pensive state that so often followed discussion of mankind’s darker nature, he had questions for her.

“When King Leif paid his first visit to Fiana, did he come unaccompanied?”

“No, he actually brought a friend along.”

“A friend? Do you mean Asvel?”

“No, I hadn’t met this one before. His Majesty introduced her as Lady Patty, a comrade of his from Emperor Seliph’s army.”

“Did this Lady Patty have fair hair, blue eyes, and a strong Connaught accent?”

“That’s the one. A very charming girl,” said Eyvel. “Though it seemed to me she was working hard to refine that accent.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised by that,” replied Finn. After a pause he added,“She _is_ a charming girl. Last I’d heard she was intent upon wedding General Hannibal’s son.”

“Hannibal’s son?” The encounter with Thracia’s great general was another episode in Leif’s war Eyvel had missed while serving as a piece of decorative stonework in Manster.

“Yes, Cairpre. One of the children we had to rescue at the Gate of Kelves.”

“Cairpre... He was still in short trousers then,” Eyvel said, for now she remembered the boy with dark-blond hair and large button eyes. “They do grow up fast.”

“I take it Lady Patty wasn’t chattering about her betrothed.”

“I don’t believe she spoke of family at all, except to mention a brother who didn’t entirely approve of her approach to warfare. We talked mostly about what you might call the ethics and necessity of theft. She had some fierce opinions on the matter.”

“I had a few conversations with Patty along those lines during the war. I think I have a very good idea of which arguments she advanced.”

The unguarded warmth in his voice caught her by surprise, provoking the same odd, vaguely unsettled feeling she’d experienced during their conversation over things hidden amongst socks.

It was a peaceful evening but not a quiet one, not with cicadas humming and crickets chirping like bands of bards showing off in a musical duel, and they sat there until the tea was long drunk and the cups gone cold.

“Do you still believe I’m Bridget?” She didn’t fully mean to ask it but somehow couldn’t keep herself from it.

He turned to face her, and in the light of the waxing moon and the torches in the square she saw again that intense, almost painful look of total candor.

“I don’t see how you can’t be.”

Eyvel didn’t see how she _could_ be, either, and since revealing everything had already gotten to be a bit much it was time to bid one another goodnight.

**To Be Continued**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a theme to the titles.
> 
> I realize warriors and generals don't usually favor mares unless the general in question is Winfield Scott but Thornapple has a little backstory.
> 
> Regarding the desert glass, it has a real-life analogue caused by meteor strikes... and also to the residue left by nuclear strikes.
> 
> I am moving toward using proper nouns as found in the new Project Naga fan-translation but can't make myself embrace "Bridget" quite yet.  
> ETA 12/15/16: I amended it to "Bridget" everywhere.


	4. Second Cup of Coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finn lays his ulterior motive quite literally on the table-- or writing desk, rather.

_Chapter Three_

Eyvel woke in the morning to a breakfast already prepared for her and laid out on the table, something that she hadn’t enjoyed since her birthday the year that Mareeta moved out.

“You didn’t have to get up before dawn on my behalf,” she said to Finn. “Fiana sleeps late these days. There hasn’t been a bandit attack in the region since shortly after the coronation.”

Privately she was pleased he remembered that she liked her boiled eggs soft in the middle and her toast quite brown at the edges. Finn for his part let her lighthearted reprimand sail by without a reaction, other than to set a pitcher of milk on the table before her. Their matched set of mugs steamed with the promised genuine coffee.

“In Darna they take coffee in delicate cups a third the size of these, with so much sugar it’s near to the consistency of syrup,” he said as Eyvel raised the cup to her lips. “You might prefer to take it with milk if you’re accustomed to chicory.”

Eyvel actually did quite like chicory for its own sake, but the coffee, so dark it was nearly black and with a rich feel in her mouth, was to her taste even without the milk. A little sour, a little bitter, of a kind with the strong porter brewed in northern river towns.

“Sugar would ruin it,” she said, and she savored it.

So they passed at least an hour of that still summer morning, lingering in her sunlit kitchen well after the eggs and toast and coffee were gone. Eyvel felt bright and alert, but there was a strange edge to her feelings and she wondered if the coffee might be to blame. She often missed her daughter’s presence, but sitting there at the table with Finn she felt keenly how quiet it was without children in the house. Fiana itself was quiet now, though— she’d spoken the truth about the blessed lack of bandit raids. Perhaps falling into this familiar routine so easily only reminded them both of how much had changed, and irrevocably so, since their last morning in Fiana. Eyvel also could swear that she’d caught him looking at her as though…

Almost as though the act of watching her drink coffee had some magic to it.

“I don’t suppose we could have a second cup?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Finn said. “It has rather different effects than one cup too many of chicory.”

She almost replied that he’d once thought a single cup of chicory one cup too many, but that might be too much teasing for one morning. Besides, he’d learned to drink it for her sake.

“If there are no bandit gangs in the region, how does the Warrior of Fiana endure?” Finn said then, and the use of her old epithet wasn’t teasing at all.

“I’ve turned my sword into a ploughshare and toil in the fields on pleasant days like these,” she replied. By “fields” she meant Fiana’s village plot as opposed to the lush prairies of Northern Thracia, but she knew Finn had the sense and the education to grasp a bit of poetry when he heard it. “Halvan handles most of the work that involves getting one’s blade dirty around here… he and Orsin make quite the team.”

“Yes, I suppose they would.” Between sentences he'd retreated behind a familiar mask-- polite but not especially interested. She recalled then he never had been much fond of Orsin.

They cleaned up the remains of breakfast together and Eyvel announced her intention to spend some hours in the village garden. Finn asked then if he might do some work in her study; Eyvel assumed he planned to write some letters— hopefully a message to the king and queen— and agreed.

Small as it was, the communal plot produced a better yield with every season since the advent of peace. Eyvel worked that morn until the sun was near to its zenith; she turned the earth while Halvan’s sister Patricia picked green-striped beetles off the potato plants. They collected the day’s harvest of small delicate marrow, plump tomatoes, and a few early raspberries, then divided it as they always did, with the largest portion destined for Tanya’s house. Eyvel took her share home, where it made a light lunch for herself and Finn. It did strike her how curiously normal it felt to find him there waiting for her. Finn asked a few questions about how well the crops fared year to year now; he’d noticed the cork etched with “PURPLE DRAGON” in last night’s bottle and guessed the wine hailed from Mt. Violdrake. Eyvel related all the encouraging news, from Dadgar’s flourishing vines to her own local successes.

“It’s almost as though the earth itself is healing from some long sickness,” she concluded.

* * *

They traded places after lunch, as Finn went out to exercise Thornapple while Eyvel elected to stay in. He mentioned he’d left a book on the desk that she might care to glance over, which sounded agreeable enough to Eyvel once she’d handled a few other small tasks.

The children had called her study “the library,” a measure of its value in terms of the written word. Eyvel had taught Mareeta to read and made sure Fiana had a treasure-trove of books for her daughter’s education and pleasure. She’d been delighted to have a pair of bright and literate children tumble into her household in the form of Prince Leif and Princess Nanna, as the native youngsters of Fiana preferred songs and stories to words upon a page. The future king and queen had not, of course, learned to love books without someone guiding them in that direction. Eyvel wasn't much surprised to see Finn had several books even among the meager possessions they’d unpacked last night. The two matched volumes with dark leather covers already had been slipped onto her shelves next to the simple history book she'd used to teach Mareeta about the First Crusade. Eyvel looked at their tattered spines marked by illegible lettering and wondered if they’d been “rescued” from one of the ruined desert shrines-- Finn did, after all, have some views on necessary theft that must have made for interesting discussions with young Lady Patty.

The book he'd left on her desk was slim by comparison, bound by fresh leather, its crisp pages inscribed by new ink in a neat and familiar hand.

_At the heart of the continent of Jugdral lies Grannvale, the kingdom founded by Saint Heim of the Twelve Crusaders. Supporting the royal heirs of Heim are six duchies, each led by a noble house of Crusader lineage. These six states have considerable autonomy within their vast territories and by tradition maintain standing armies of their own. In the year 757 of the Grann calendar, factions divided the court of the aging King Azmur._

Eyvel was thus dropped into a stew of decades-old political intrigue, peppered with the names of the blessed and infamous. Prince Kurth the Martyr of Grannvale and sainted Claude of Edda, the factions of House Jungby and House Chalphy arrayed against those of Freege and Dozel, and a passing mention of the young lord of House Velthomer— now in her own time reviled as the sire of the Dark Lord. From there the machinations swirled outward through the rest of Jugdral: the sack of Darna, Grannvale’s retaliation against Isaach, Verdane’s attack on the stronghold of Jungby and abduction of the Lady Aideen, Lord Sigurd’s impetuous decision to embark on a rescue mission with a handful of Chalphy’s knights. She knew some of these things didn't happen quite as related on the page-- from Galzus she'd learned a different account entirely of the sack of Darna and ensuing violence in Isaach than was relayed in popular legend-- but she read along with the sense that this limited perspective, the view of Grannvale's elite in the late 750s, was entirely deliberate.

_Thus the threshold of fate was crossed. None at the time did recognize this disturbance as the forewarning of calamity…_

The narrative ended there, midway through the page. Eyvel quickly thumbed through the remainder of the book, but the pages were yet unmarred.

“You didn't let on that you spent the morning _writing_ a book," she said to Finn when he returned.

"I suppose I didn't know a way to say that without sounding ridiculous," he replied.

"I wouldn't call it ridiculous. Ambitious, yes-- very. Is this to be an account of Lord Sigurd's campaign?"

"Yes...and no. I'd thought to cover the entirety of the new Crusade."

Put so baldly it did sound a bit ridiculous.

"I'd imagine that would take a few years," she said, echoing his dispassionate tone.

"Three or four at the least," he said, without apparent concern for the investment. "I do feel I've done as much field research as possible, and all that remains is to commit it to the page."

"Field research," she repeated. "So did you come here to hole up like a monk behind Fiana's walls and write your chronicle?"

"If all I required were a desk, a cell, and writing supplies then Darna might have served me well," he replied. "As I said last night, I'd hoped we'd now have time to talk."

"And to write."

"That would be ideal."

"Is there a reason you can't return to King Leif's side and write your chronicle there?"

"His Majesty has little need of my presence," he said. "The king is surrounded by people who can guide him far better than I could.”

"Is that so?"

“We each have our part, and it’s not my part to pass myself off as a high general or some minister of state.”

She might have responded with some tart comment about false modesty being its own brand of arrogance but intuition made Eyvel keep her tongue in check as they stared one another down. Of course she knew that part of raising children was letting them go, just as she'd stepped aside to let Mareeta make her own way in the world, but surely three years of silence was time enough to let King Leif come into his own. And she did know Finn well enough to understand that his merits did not lie in the political sphere. He'd been an excellent _second_ for her militia.

She was in one moment displeased with him, disappointed in him, in sympathy with him, and willing to find out what Finn thought his "part" actually was.

She also could not forget the way he'd been observing her that morning.

"You came here to see me," she said, presenting it as a statement and not a question.

“I said we’d now have the chance to talk of everything." He kept offering that up to her as though it should be justification enough. Perhaps it was-- Eyvel heard the sudden raw sincerity in his voice, the doubt and regret and desire for this long-delayed understanding.

“While you endeavor to put the last twenty-five years into words?”

"If it should prove possible."

Eyvel wondered if she were, after all, ready to hear all he was holding back. She was used to reliable and competent Finn, polite and restrained Finn, the man who perhaps never said quite _enough_ but certainly never said too much. But she was glad, after all, that he hadn't sequestered himself in Darna.

"I would like to see this prove possible," she said, and hoped this was enough of a _yes_. "But before you pen anything else, please send Their Majesties a letter to let them know you're alive."

He closed his eyes then and shook his head slowly-- not a denial of her request, but an admission that fulfilling it cost him something. She didn't know what, and honestly Eyvel could not fathom why.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of Finn writing a history of the Holy Wars is not mine. It comes straight out of the interview with Shouzou Kaga found in the Treasure artbook. Let's just say the idea that Finn decided to become a war chronicler or "historical storyteller" after the war up-ended my perception of his purpose as a character in a way I found absolutely delightful.
> 
> The book in question, in this case, has some text those familiar with FE4 would find rather familiar. I've taken elements from both the primary English fan-translation and the still-unreleased Project Naga translation to make the "text" here.


	5. Fine as Fine Can Be

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dog days of summer followed by a ride through the beautiful countryside.

The winds changed direction that evening, and instead of the refreshing breeze off the sea that kept Fiana comfortable in summer, the Dragon’s Breath came sweeping in from the west. To stand in the Dragon’s Breath was to feel the rush of air that gave no relief at all from heat; Fiana coped as it always did, staying indoors during the worst of the day and emerging after dark to have communal meals in the village square. Some nights the suppers lasted until midnight, and the children treated it like a holiday, one where they were allowed to chase fireflies and shout over falling stars until they were too sleepy to stand. Eyvel offered apologies for Finn for the turn in the weather so soon after his arrival, but he after all knew that Fiana usually suffered through a sweltering fortnight after the peak of summer, and any event he didn’t seem bothered. He used the hours sequestered indoors to work on his chronicle, and after sundown he would free Thornapple from the stables and go racing off across the fields with her. Sometimes Eyvel would watch them disappear beneath the sullen horizon streaked with ugly lines of red as the hot winds whipped at her hair and her clothes.

Otherwise, she did not trouble herself overmuch with regards to her new living companion. She had to worry about seeing the village’s crops through the Dragon’s Breath, and to see likewise that the oldest and youngest residents of Fiana didn’t sicken from the heat. Finn kept an eye on the condition of Maggie and Rose and she thanked him sincerely for the care he gave to Fiana’s horses as well as his mare.

Eight days into this spell of bad weather, Finn asked if Eyvel might want to read what he’d written thus far.

“I’d be delighted. I must admit I’ve been deeply curious,” she said.

“Please don’t spare my feelings if you find no merit in it,” Finn replied, and he left her the manuscript and went out to tend to the horses.

Eyvel lit one of the new and ingenious magic lamps that gave off no heat and settled down in her favorite chair to continue the tale where she’d left off, with a horde of axemen from Verdane encircling the citadel of Jungby.

_Lady Aideen, unarmed and clad in the white robes of her order, stood firm before the ducal throne. Aged but nineteen years, she spoke in that moment with the resolve of her foremother Ulir._

_“Please don’t blame yourself, Midayle. Everyone has given all they could. I beseech you to worry for me no longer. Do what you can to escape without me.”_

_“I apologize, milady, but I won’t,” said Sir Midayle, for the beauty of his lady’s selflessness overrode in his heart the desire to obey her command. “None of us will turn our backs on you now, no matter our chances. Even if it does mean our lives…”_

_“Thank you, Midayle,” said Lady Aideen, and for a moment she trembled before regaining her poise. “I am sorry it has come to this…”_

The scene switched then from the brief and violent siege of Jungby to the courtyard of Chalphy Castle, where the young Lord Sigurd was about to dash off into battle without so much as single knight at his side. Eyvel enjoyed the oddly comical banter between Sigurd and his men-at-arms, who might have stepped right out of a rustic theater show. Then it was back to Jungby, where valiant Sir Midayle was unhorsed and apparently slain by the barbarian leader, who then seized fair Lady Aideen and carried her off as a prize.

_“Back off! This one’s mine,” Gandolf snarled at his captain, then gave a crude warning that the other man could avail himself of the women of Grannvale after the land was theirs._

_“You’re all animals,” said Aideen, heedless of the blades surrounding her, and she turned her face skyward. “Gods above, instill these people with even a little human decency…”_

_“Oi, what are ya mumblin’ about?” Gandolf turned upon the maiden of Jungby and seized her again by the shoulder. “We’re outta here. And no dawdlin’ this time, you hear me?”_

Eyvel stared for a while at the unexpected sentences that had issued from Finn’s pen.

“I’m not sure I know how to assess this, Tiger,” she said to Mareeta’s elderly cat, who’d responded to the heat by becoming an orange puddle on the floor.

_“We both know there’s more to it than that,” said the young lord of Dozel, and he clapped his friend upon the back. “Come on, Azel, what’s the real reason we’re here?”_

_“Er, I… I…have no idea what you mean,” Lord Azel replied, the pitch of his voice rising higher with every word._

_“That Lady Aideen of Jungby has you all worked up, isn’t that right? Everybody knows you like her.”_

_“N-no, of course not, you dolt!”_

_Lord Azel’s face flushed deeply even as he made his stammering denials, and Lord Lex proceeded to tease his friend over his ladylove as they rode southward towards the borderlands of Jungby and Chalphy._

Eyvel was puzzling over the antics of young nobles when Finn let himself back in the house.

“Finn, what sort of book is this? I thought you were penning a war history and this reads more like a romance.”

“That’s not unfair. This isn’t meant to be a history of warfare suitable for the lesson plan at Behalla’s Academy,” he said. “It’s meant for the likes of Orsin and Tanya and their children.”

She looked hard at him then, because Finn _knew_ that Orsin and Tanya had but little use for the books in her library or anywhere else.

“Then you should try your hand at verse. A bard came through here some months back and did a performance for us in exchange for room and board. Orsin and Tanya brought the children over and we had a wonderful evening. One of his songs was the tale of a young village boy named Orsin and his magical hatchet that brought down enemies from one end of Thracia to the other.” She paused to let the absurdity of it all register. “The children were enchanted by it.”

“Songs and stained-glass windows and pageants in the village church are all a means of reaching the people, yes,” Finn agreed, and he began to pace the room, carefully stepping around Tiger whenever she proved an obstacle. “One thing I found striking, even on my first campaign with Prince Quan, was what the common people on farms and in small villages knew and yet didn’t know. They could tell you the most unsavory secrets of the local nobles with a startling degree of accuracy, and yet the deeds of the Crusaders already were distorted into myth.”

“It doesn’t sound, based on things I’ve learned in the past few years, that only the common folk proved mistaken or misinformed,” said Eyvel.

“That’s true,” Finn said, and stopped his pacing abruptly. “Eyvel, did you ever learn what Crusaders truly are?”

“Since I’m not certain what you mean I’ll just say _no_.”

“I don't think I care to speak of it now,” he said, and continued his pacing.

Eyvel didn’t get an explanation of Crusaders that evening, nor did she get a proper explanation as to what use Tanya and Orsin and Halvan and Patricia might have for a book like the one Finn was writing, this strange mixture of low humor and political intrigue.

“How on earth are you transcribing conversations like this when you weren’t even present?” Eyvel demanded of Finn after reading a few more pages of Grannvalean nobles being childish. “And don’t claim you did _field research_ for it.”

The look he gave her in return was morose rather than defensive.

“Eyvel, have you ever been around people who recount the same story again and again, as though each time it’s a novelty?”

“I could think of a few.”

“The occupation phase of a war is excessively dull. I may as well have been present for all these missing moments.”

* * *

On the fourteenth day, the winds changed again. Eyvel woke to a soft blue dawn with refreshing air pouring in through the windows, not quite the first hint of autumn but at least a blessed relief from the very worst of summer. A warm lump at her feet proved to be Tiger, who’d shunned her company while the Dragon’s Breath reigned, and Eyvel took this as a good omen. She and Finn celebrated with more of that precious imported coffee, something neither of them had wanted to touch during the stagnation of the last two weeks.

“I think we should head into town and replenish,” Eyvel said, for there were few delicacies left in her pantry. “I’m certain it’ll be a fine day, as Tiger’s decided she can stand my affection again.”

“Ah…”

She knew his vocalizations well enough to know this small sound denoted embarrassment— though on whose behalf wasn’t clear.

“What are you hiding?”

“She’s been at the foot of my bed every night,” he confessed.

“Finn, you can co-opt the horses if you like but please don’t steal my cat.”

That elicited the smile Eyvel’d found especially appealing. Finn said then he needed more ink and ought to stock up on paper and so they decided it was a fine day to take Thornapple and ride to Ith.

Finn lifted Eyvel up onto the mare as easily as he ever had. The sensation of being held, if briefly, stayed with Eyvel as Thornapple carried them toward the coast. It was hardly the first time she’d ridden like this with her arms around his waist, but she couldn’t recall ever feeling quite so much _delight_ in being this close. Delight in a ride when she was no horsewoman, yes. Delight in suddenly having a battle partner who could whisk her away at speed to the exasperation of their opponents, absolutely. But this sensation of closeness was worlds away from the dark thrill of combat.

Once they reached Ith, she did not let Finn proceed directly to the stationer’s shop to buy his ink and paper. First they went to the barber’s shop, as Eyvel claimed her hair needed some touching up after the long dry summer. Finn did get the hint and allowed the barber to trim away the long ends of his sun-damaged hair while the shop assistant worked on Eyvel.

“You want me to do something different with it this time, Miss Eyvel? Maybe put it up in back?” asked Katy as she brushed out Eyvel’s long hair.

“No, thank you, just pull it back as usual,” Eyvel said, as she wasn’t ready to look the part of the village crone yet.

“I could put it in a braid,” Katy offered. “The fine ladies in Connaught all go for fancy braids.”

“Maybe next time,” Eyvel said, and she left the barber’s studio with her hair styled just as she liked it.

“That’s more like it,” she said of Finn’s appearance when she saw him with hair cut shorter in the back and trimmed evenly about the ears. He looked a little younger for it, she thought. With this taken care of, it was off to the stationer’s so Finn could acquire his ink and another blank book, and then to the market. Eyvel picked up a string of dried plums, a pot of cherries in brandy, a block of white cheese with herbs and a wheel of yellow cheese with mustard seed. Finn suggested they find a pleasant spot to eat on their journey back, in the manner of a picnic, and so Eyvel filled a basket with oat buns and soft cheese and two late-summer peaches that might not last the trip back to Fiana without bruising. Finn added a sack of barley-sugars to the basket, and his hand brushed against hers as he dropped in the sweets. Accidentally, of course.

“Is there anything else we need today?” she said, underscoring _need_ so she wouldn’t think about a jacket made of saffron-hued leather that she’d eyed on her last two trips to Ith… or about a lovely shirt made of cotton-silk mixture dyed a deep, soft blue that would’ve suited Finn far better than the plain linen shirts in his current wardrobe. Finn couldn’t think of anything else truly _necessary_ , either, and so they returned to Thornapple.

The road from Ith to Fiana hugged the coastline for a while before veering inward, and Eyvel suggested they stop for lunch while they could still see the blue curve of the ocean in the distance. The air tasted fresh and the marine breeze made the long grasses rustle and the golden poppies dance on their stems. Neither of them had a great deal to say while they enjoyed the oat buns and peaches. One peach already had a soft dark spot on it, and Finn tried to take that one, but Eyvel waved him away and bit into the damaged fruit anyway. Finn let out a little sigh and looked out over the sea. After a few moments, he reached for the basket in a gesture best described as a preoccupied fumble, missing entirely the sack of barley candy that was his apparent goal.

Eyvel, on impulse, wiped the last of the peach juice from her fingers and reached for his hand. The instant they made contact, Eyvel thought she felt a spark. Finn’s fingers closed around her hand without a trace of hesitation.

As she looked into his eyes, Eyvel saw only their blue intensity and not the lines that time and care had cut around them.

“Do you…” The would-be chronicler of Jugdral’s disaster had few words at his disposal right then.

“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

“You… think?” he echoed.

The warm afternoon sun and sea breeze and long grasses and poppies were swirling around them, but Eyvel shut all that out as she kept her grasp on Finn’s hand and studied his eyes, his face, the pace of each breath.

“Is this because you imagine I’m someone else?”

“No,” he said, and on hearing this she let her lips descend towards his and meet.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The name Tiger comes from the title of Thracia 776 itself, often mangled into "Tiger 7" by online translators.
> 
> Classic pre-modern history texts are often full of opinion, rumor, innuendo, things that never actually happened, and the author's personal slant on the matter. Come to think of it, so are more than a few modern ones!


	6. Wherefore and Why

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eyvel gets a little closer to an unanswerable question at the heart of Finn's project.

_So what was the Crown Prince of Leonster doing running about in Verdane?” Eyvel asked as Thornapple carried them through a dull stretch of grasses punctuated by scrubby trees. Finn had mentioned, in the course of explaining to Mareeta the difference between pine cones and pineapples, that he’d been with Quan in Verdane. Eyvel knew that Lord Leif’s father had traveled abroad before his untimely death, but she really did wonder why Quan ventured so far a-field with so much trouble right there in Thracia._

_“He and Lady Ethlyn were supporting Lord Sigurd on his campaign there.”_

_Eyvel tightened her grip around him, quite without meaning to._

_“Finn, are you saying you knew Sigurd of Chalphy?” she said after a few uncertain moments._

_“Yes. I was in his party for about three years,” he replied, as though this were some mundane detail of his previous life and not astonishing news._

_“What was he like?”_

_“Valiant, honorable, compassionate. A model of chivalry. More than a little reckless, impulsive…” He recited these qualities with detachment at first, then broke off and said with tinge of sorrow and wonder to his voice, “He looks younger to me with each passing year.”_

_“It never occurred to me,” she said, a good quarter of a mile later, “that the rebel knight of the Lost Kingdom would’ve also known Sigurd.”_

_Finn looked back at her then, and now she could see in his face how remarkable he did find it despite having lived through it._

_“_ _Unlikely, isn’t it?”_

_And they spoke no more of it that day._

* * *

Tiger had managed to wedge herself between them during the night. Eyvel prodded the cat with one finger, but Tiger was curled in a happy ball and didn’t stir. Eyvel stretched as best as she could without disturbing the cat or Finn. He’d rolled onto his side, and even in the low light she could see clearly the patch of damaged skin on his back, a blotch the size of her fist, still an unhealthy grayish shade after ten long years. She traced the outline of the scar that commemorated their first encounter; Finn didn’t wake, and Eyvel noted that he must not sleep as lightly as he once did. Before, the faintest noise or motion in the dark would have Finn ready to bolt.

“Either we’re getting used to peaceful times or we are getting old,” she said aloud, but in the present she didn’t mind either possibility.

Eyvel slipped out of bed and went downstairs. It wasn’t quite morning, as she could see a line of gold across the horizon through her east-facing windows and a full moon balanced on the rim of the world through one west-facing window.

“The next full moon should bring us the harvest,” she said to the empty kitchen, and there was no sense of anxiety or dread in the words. Another harvest, better than the last, in King Leif’s Thracia. Eyvel watched the moon as it turned gold, then rose, and then was gone beneath the earth, all the while contemplating that long-past conversation with Finn and their unlikely role in world events.

Finn showed up when Eyvel was grinding the coffee. He had Tiger riding on his shoulders, and Eyvel could only shake her head at the sight.

“I’ve known pirates who carried birds and monkeys around like that, but it’s just not right for a cat.”

“Which pirates were these?” he asked, even as Tiger jumped down and went to lurk beneath the table.

“Local riff-raff,” Eyvel said, and gave a few names of men she’d slain or chased off long years past. “We used to have a few colorful characters along the coast— though a soft spot for birds didn’t make them good by any means. By the time you came here it was all comparatively dull. I think Lifis may’ve been the most interesting scoundrel around these parts.”

“Has he met up with justice yet?” If Finn didn’t always disguise that he wasn’t terribly fond of Orsin, he made no effort at all to hide his opinion of Lifis.

“No. He’s still running the outpost at Kelves.” Eyvel let her flat response convey her own low esteem for the former thief. “I hear he’s doing a good job at controlling the pirates. I also hear his methods are not exactly on the right side of the law, but no one’s complaining.”

“To what degree would this be on the wrong side of the law?”

“Extortion, theft, the occasional shadowy murder,” said Eyvel. “Again, as long as it’s against the pirates no one much cares.”

With that, the water came to a boil, and Eyvel busied herself with pouring it over the coffee and forgot about Lifis.

* * *

 

Fiana did not turn itself inside out over Miss Eyvel coming to terms with her houseguest. Perhaps Patricia and Tanya and the rest simply didn’t notice, at least not immediately. Perhaps there was nothing much remarkable in the change, though Eyvel well remembered days past with Halvan and Orsin joking to themselves over the mysterious stranger who’d moved into Miss Eyvel’s place; they’d only stopped after Lady Nanna was driven to angry tears by the rumors. But now, there was only quiet— another sign, perhaps, that all the yesterday’s children had indeed grown up. When Eyvel made that observation to Finn, though, he objected strongly to the idea that youngsters were any more prone to gossip than the rest of humanity.

“It wasn’t village children telling us the sordid secrets of noble houses,” he said, and the conversation steered back toward his writing project for the first time in several days.

“I got to the point where Lord Sigurd meets up with his sister and brother-in-law,” said Eyvel, for Finn’s latest burst of writing outpaced her ability to read it in a single sitting. “I think Prince Quan had an apprentice along with him, but he didn’t seem very interesting.”

“Should you find him interesting?”

Eyvel really hadn’t expected Finn to take her baited hook when she’d slighted his younger self.

“I really can’t say. Finn. I still don’t know what sort of tale it is that you’re telling.”

It took Eyvel several more days to finish the first chapter of the work, and by the time she’d done so Eyvel had a more weighty question in her mind than whether or not Quan’s apprentice ought to be a figure of any particular interest. The entrance of Lord Sigurd’s great antagonist obliterated all other concerns.

_“I hardly expected to see Chalphy struggle so against mere barbarians. So, Sigurd, this is all you’ve amounted to…”_

_With the bandit party reduced to ashes in the wind, the lord of Velthomer pressed on south, now less inclined to cultivate the heir of Chalphy as any sort of protege or ally but bearing him an emblem of King Azmur’s favor nonetheless._

The image of young Duke Arvis on his way to that first fateful meeting with the man he’d later traduce, betray, and murder stayed with her, and at some dark hour of the night she went so far as to nudge Finn awake to discuss the matter.

“Do you truly think Arvis had it in for Sigurd as early as that?”

“What are you… oh, yes. Yes, I believe that Lord Arvis relegated Lord Sigurd into the category of those who were disposable well before Lady Deirdre became a part of his calculations.”

“You believe that,” Eyvel echoed. “You can’t possibly know for certain, can you? He didn’t confess to it.”

“No,” said Finn. “But a study of the late emperor’s character and motivations would lead to that conclusion…”

And so Finn slipped back into sleep, his conscience plainly clear over the matter of Arvis. Eyvel remained awake some time longer, but before she too returned to sleep she thought at last that she’d glimpsed the “sort of tale” this was going to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From discussion over the new Project Naga translation of FE4 I think Arvis's actions and statements do indeed contribute to a fair interpretation that Sigurd was not fated for good things in whatever world Arvis built. But, as the development team did love their ambiguity and even outright trolling, someone who takes a more positive view of Arvis is welcome to it.


	7. The House You Live In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Eyvel gets deeper into the history of the Holy War, she begins to contemplate the nature of memory.

Out in the garden the tomatoes and raspberries hit their peak, and Eyvel spent an entire day up to her elbows in jam getting ready for winter. The vegetable marrows ended for the year but the winter squash was ripening now, both the large sweet ones with their blue-grey knobbled rinds and the small meaty ones with shells striped gold and cream. As harvest-time approached, the laziness of late summer turned to a growing sense of urgency in the countryside even as nightfall came perceptibly earlier with each passing week. Eyvel’s days became hectic again as she guided Halvan through his civil duties; she was grateful return home at twilight to find the floors clean and the pots all washed and supper waiting for her. Once Finn relocated from the guest bedroom to her own room he ceased to ask permission to do what needed to be done around the house, and the happy result was that Eyvel no longer need worry about the structure around her own ears. Finn even had a few extra treats in store for her, like the supper he made of two striped squash baked up with a surprise tucked under the shell.

Eyvel felt her eyebrows rise as she tasted the savory fish custard tinted yellow by marigold petals in place of the saffron they couldn't afford.  

"This doesn't strike me as the sort of delicacy served at the royal table in Leonster," she said, for the dish was sweet-sour and bright in a way that just struck her as _foreign_.  

"No, it's based on a memory of something that was popular in Verdane.  I've been spending so much time looking back on that first campaign that I suppose I just... wanted to re-create something of it."  

"You were so close to the past that you wanted to taste it," Eyvel said, and she smiled at the way that deep-buried strain of romance revealed itself again like a vein of precious metal coming to the surface.  

"I did," Finn confessed, and he began to twirl his spoon in a rare display of agitation.  "I was too excited to be homesick then, too excited to be afraid for my life when I ought to have been.  I had to keep all that bottled up because I didn't want to look like a child in the company of real knights, and some days I felt like I was going to fly apart from the pure sensation of it all.  I kept telling myself to take in everything because I might never have such an adventure again."  

Eyvel let her foot beneath the table drift until it touched against Finn's.  She tried to imagine him as the youth she'd glimpsed briefly in the pages of his chronicle-- and "bottled up" was the word for how he'd come across in that glimpse, at the very age that Lord Leif had been when they first allowed him to battle.  He couldn't have been much like Leif, she thought; Finn at fifteen would surely have been older in a sense than King Leif was now in his twenties.  Eyvel knew that somehow despite not having much intuition as to how she'd been herself at fifteen.  

"Well, I can't speak for its fidelity to the original but this is delicious," she said, and spooned up some more custard to prove she did like it in spite of its foreign tang.   

"It's far from perfect," he said, and didn't need to explain away its flaws by protesting the lack of the right ingredients or the sheer number of years since he'd been in Verdane.

"You should keep trying at it.  We'll have plenty of squash this year.  Besides, if I'm going through the tale of the Holy War along with you, I wouldn't mind being able to taste it every now and again."  

Her words reassured him, or perhaps the touch of her foot beneath the table did. Finn stopped playing with his spoon and they enjoyed the meal with its imperfections.

* * *

 

After a day spent mediating trivial squabbles Eyvel found it almost pleasant to slip into the past. To catch up on reading in bed, by flickering candlelight, brought to mind days when she’d caught the children reading long after they should’ve been asleep and heightened her pleasure in it.

Fair Lady Aideen met some interesting characters in the prison where she’d been cast by the brutal prince of Verdane… not least, the child-thief who escaped with her once the prince’s handsome younger brother set them free.

_“Hey! Miss Aideen!” Dew called to her as he struggled to catch up to her, for encumbered by her robes as she was the lady of Jungby possessed a long stride. “Want something good? Here, check out this little beauty!”_

_Dew brandished a staff of exceptional quality, its orb crowned by a delicate winged figure._

_“It’s not gonna do anything for me, so here you go!”_

_Aideen knew the value of the staff Dew must have plundered from Gandolf’s halls as they escaped— despite his protestations to Prince Jamke that he was finished with thieving._

_“This warp staff…where exactly did you find it, Dew?”_

_“Oh... er... I... I found it just over there! Yeah! That’s right. Weird, isn’t it? I betcha one of your gods put it down here. Y’know, just for you to find!”_

_Aideen did not believe a word of this improvised story, but on seeing Dew fidget as his impulses warred with his newly-sworn desire to do right, she could only smile._

_“I doubt that… but having a staff like this will make my duties easier, Dew. You’ve been a great help. Thank you.”_

_The noble lady’s smile was an absolution for Dew, and he walked then with a light heart as he shadowed her steps, alert for any cracking twig that might herald the approach of Gandolf’s men._

"I like the little rogue," Eyvel said.   

"I thought you were out of patience with rogues,” Finn said. He’d been assembling a few strands of her hair into a little braid while Eyvel read.

“This one sounds like his heart’s in the right place,” she replied. “His pangs of conscience aren’t _quite_ the system of ethics that I’ve heard elsewhere, but he’s not another Lifis.”

Eyvel could not bring herself to feel quite the same sympathy toward some of Jugdral’s noted heroes.

_“Lady Ayra of Isaach, I presume? Sigurd told me of your story. I’m Quan, Prince of Leonster.”_

_“It’s a pleasure,” said the princess after a weighted pause._

_“I’m sorry but I just have to ask you. Why did Isaach attack Darna in the first place? Surely you knew doing so would bring the wrath of Grannvale down upon your people. I can’t fathom it— so callous and irresponsible an act is unlike the King Mananan I know.”_

_Lady Ayra’s dark eyes flared then, but not with indignation at the harsh words aimed at her father._

_“Quan, did you actually know my lord father?” Hope colored her words, as though she’d found a genuine connection among foreigners._

_“No. Not personally,” said Lord Quan as he stepped away from the implication of his careless words. “But my father knew him well and has only the utmost praise for him even now. My father also speaks fondly of your brother Prince Maricle and thought him a fine young man.”_

_“He said that, did he?” Despite her fresh grief for both father and brother, Princess Ayra only raised her chin higher upon hearing these words from Leonster’s heir. “Thank you. I am proud to hear such praise for them. They were both warriors of the highest reputation and attacking a defenseless city like Darna is something they would not do. No, the lord of Rivough took it upon himself to attack Darna, not my honored father.”_

_“Are you kidding? Why has Grannvale not been informed of this? Prince Kurth would withdraw his offensive if only he knew.”_

“You know that’s not entirely the way Galzus tells it,” she said with a sidelong glance at Finn, for he was well aware that Mareeta’s blood father was none other than the only heir of this maligned Lord of Rivough. 

“That is the account Princess Ayra gave to my lord and to Lord Sigurd,” came his unperturbed reply.

“That may be,” she said, but as there was no budging Finn on this point— not yet— she went on to her next concern. “Also, Finn, don’t take this the wrong way…”

“Yes?”

“Your late lord comes across as quite… rude.”

“Does he?” Finn had fallen back into that familiar tone of complete dispassion.

“And selfish. And… I think _self-indulgent_ is the word.” From his very introduction, Quan and his princess seemed more concerned with themselves and their immediate circle of loved ones than with the gravity of war in a foreign land.

“Yes, I suppose that he might.”

He didn’t change what he’d already written of Quan, but the next day Finn inserted a scene in that chapter, an interaction between Prince Quan and his “bottled up” nobody of an apprentice that showed Quan at his best, all warmth and generosity.

He did not, she noticed, alter a single word regarding Rivough.

* * *

 

“How far back do your memories go?” she asked him one morning as they lay together in her bed, the blankets cast aside as the sheen of perspiration dried on their skin.

“I have a few scattered memories of when my parents were alive, riding with my mother and coloring on one my father’s maps. I would have been around three years old.” Finn rubbed at the mark on his wrist where she’d gripped him a little too firmly. “They died along with my sister shortly after I turned four, and I was sent to my grandfather until he passed away, and from that time my memories are uninterrupted.”

“What is that like?” she asked after a moment of astonishment. Mareeta’s memories began at the age of five and even then weren’t always a reflection of how things did happen, and Eyvel thought that was normal for children.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“What is it like to have all those memories rattling around in your head after forty years?”

“Oh. It’s not… well, if you carry more than one weapon at a time, you don’t try to wield them all. You keep the ones you don’t need where you can retrieve them and use them when appropriate, though you never lose the sense that they’re at hand. That’s the best way I can explain it.”

“I see.”

“Most of those memories aren’t very interesting. I can tell you about the color of the blankets in the apprentice barracks in Leonster or the name of Lady Ethlyn’s favorite jeweler when we stayed in Agusty but those details are… inconsequential.”

This still was not something Eyvel could easily take into her own head. She’d viewed memory as less of a storehouse of items than a web of interconnected strands that became tangled at times. Whether Finn was working his way through such a web and trying to weave a tapestry out of it or was just patiently assembling little separate fragments into a mosaic, she could admire this enormous task but never fully appreciate it. Her distant past was but a blank space— the web broken, the storehouse empty, the page washed clean by the surf of the eastern shore.

What the surf hadn’t washed clean was her own body. There was the crude tattoo on one shoulder that she took to be a souvenir of some youthful impulse, the scattering of scars from battles she couldn’t remember, and then the other scars that Finn must have seen but never yet commented upon— the silvery lines etched across her skin that no blade had given her. There were memories locked in her flesh, bound somewhere where she could not, in fact retrieve them.

“You’ve gone tense,” he said, his lips soft against her ear.

“I was thinking of how strangely we complement one another,” she replied, and turned her head so they might share in a complementary kiss.

* * *

 

_Lord Lex followed the light in hopes of finding a path along the lakeshore that might cause them less grief than the obstacles offered by the Spirit Forest. He found only a dead end in the form of a spit of land curling into the vast expanse of blue water. As Lex turned away in disgust, one boot sank into the soft earth and he stumbled._

_“Ugh,” he exclaimed, and he swore to the marsh birds. “I’ve dropped my axe.”_

_Lex expected no reply other than the unsympathetic cries of the gulls, but a melodious voice from behind caused him to jump in his boots._

_“Your lost axe… was it this golden axe?”_

_Lord Lex spun around and beheld a graceful woman of mature years, dressed in the robes of a queen and bearing an axe with golden blade and jeweled haft. When Lex, struck dumb in astonishment, gave her no reply, the woman produced a second weapon, rare and exquisite as the first._

_“Or, perhaps, this silver axe?”_

_“Nah, my axe isn’t anything fine as those two,” said Lord Lex as he found his tongue._

_“Your honestly shines brightly,” said this noble lady of the marshes. “As a reward for your virtue, to you I give this axe worthy of a hero.”_

“Finn, did any of this actually happen?”

“Lord Lex told the story of the mysterious lady of Lake Verdane from the day he arrived in camp with his heroic weapon,” he replied.

“Finn, you know that Patricia claims that a strange lady came out of a lake and gave her the very axe that Halvan uses to this day.”

“Have I ever mentioned that the axe Halvan so cherishes is in all respects identical to the one used by the late lord of Dozel?”

She had nothing to give in response to this but an uneasy smile, and Eyvel did wonder to herself if Finn’s memories weren’t quite as precise and accessible as he believed.

**To Be Continued...**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some people believe the mysterious lady who gives Lex the Brave Axe is, say, the ghost of his mother. Doesn't explain why Patricia's telling a similar story in FE5.
> 
> Speaking of FE5, while King Mananan of Isaach comes across as something of a martyr in FE4, his reputation takes a beating in the midquel. It's hard to know what to make of a man who wages war on his in-laws and casts his bloodline descendants out into the world. Just one of Jugdral's many mysteries...
> 
> And yes, Quan's speech to Ayra makes him out to be somewhat rude, or at least not a super-courteous specimen of prince.


	8. Rainy Day People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life flows pleasantly along in Fiana even as Finn's narrative reaches its first milestone-- the love story at the central of Jugdral's turmoil.

“I’m afraid you won’t get much done on your chronicle this afternoon,” Eyvel said as she tied a satin bow around a small bright parcel. “We’ve been invited to Tanya’s for the birthday of her eldest girl.”

“Ah. Will Dagdar be there? It would be pleasant to talk with him again.”

“Sadly, no. He and Marty have their hands full with the harvest. He’ll be down from the mountains after things have settled for the season.”

“Understandable,” said Finn, and the switch from a glimmer of anticipation to bland resignation was so complete, and so predictable, that Eyvel decided to tweak him a little.

“You can spend the time catching up with Orsin. He’s quite forgiven you for the time you left him and the other boys in jail.” 

* * *

 

No old slights from wartime sullied the party for little Eugenia. Genie, as she was called, loved the collection of trinkets that Eyvel gave her as a present. Before the tray of birthday sweets was even finished, Genie was twirling in the yard and proclaiming at the top of her exceptionally sound little lungs that she was a pirate queen.

“I think we’re seeing the future of Fiana’s defenses,” Finn said as Genie chopped at invisible hordes with her imaginary axe.

Small pugnacious Genie might be Orsin’s girl through and through, but her energetic charm was enough to entice the veteran of the holy wars to play with her. Eyvel watched as Finn gave the self-proclaimed pirate queen a ride on his shoulders and wondered if he were thinking of that unseen granddaughter back in Leonster. Once Genie, Olly, and the other children had eaten and shouted their way into a round of naps, Eyvel and Finn lingered for several hours just talking of inconsequential things with Orsin, Tanya, and Orsin’s father. Nobody uttered a word on war or politics or the sorrows of the last decade; instead they spoke the curious ways of small children and the havoc that deer could make of a rose garden. Eyvel drank in the fine sight of Orsin on perfectly cordial terms with his straight-laced father— and on the equally fine if unexpected sight of Finn commiserating with Tanya over how accursedly difficult it could be when a little girl decided she would eat anything _except_ the food that was actually offered her. When one of Tanya’s tales about Olly, Genie, and an entire tub of butter drew a burst of laughter out of Finn, Eyvel felt a little thrill, a flutter of elation, pass through her. By the time they’d gotten around to opening the second bottle of Purple Dragon wine, all of them were laughing together, and Eyvel had one hand resting on Finn’s arm in plain view of everyone, and everything was absolutely fine.

In the end, Eyvel had to reluctantly inform Tanya and Orsin that they needed to get back to the village. Genie, up from her nap, waved her guests a sleepy goodbye from Orsin’s shoulder. Finn offered his arm to Eyvel and they stepped out in unison, past the deer-mangled rosebushes beneath a sky marked by feathered bands of clouds like the ruffled breast of a dove. The colors— blue and gray, cream and gold— mingled with one another so that it was impossible to look at any one spot and say what exact color it might even be.

“The last perfect summer evening,” she said as they gazed upward.

“It will rain tomorrow,” he agreed, and it so did.

* * *

 

A letter from Mareeta arrived on a day when the Royal Post struggled so badly in the rain that Eyvel and Finn had to put the poor letter carrier and her dragon both up for the night. It was the first time Eyvel had actually intercepted the mail since Finn’s arrival, and she’d wondered at times if he’d been receiving missives from the royal court and not telling her. But the letter from Mareeta, unexpected as it was, erased the disappointment at not having heard from King Leif or Queen Nanna in many months. She’d made it up to Isaach, the land of her forefathers, and though the trip north wasn’t as perilous as it’d been when Lady Raquesis disappeared somewhere along that very route, it was still a bold accomplishment for a young woman on her own. But Mareeta was healthy and living comfortably, and her blade grew more skilled with each month she spent in the land of legendary swordfighters, and Eyvel could only feel pride at how her own curious little girl had blossomed in spite of every obstacle thrown in her path.

“I do envy Tanya sometimes,” she confessed that night, even as the letter carrier slept in the grand guest room Finn had used so briefly. “Mareeta was almost five when I found her, and so I never held her in my arms as a tiny thing. I never had those moments I know parents treasure, when baby prattle turns into words, or when they take those first steps on their own…”

Instead of speaking, Finn began to stroke her hair, running his fingers through the long unbound waves. Eyvel supposed that he meant to be comforting, but there was something urgent in the rhythm, as though he were also trying to reassure himself by reaching out to her. She settled her head down upon his chest and it seemed to her a sense of shared sadness lingered over them both until she finally felt asleep.

* * *

 

Finn made the most of the autumn rains and the inactivity the unceasing downpour forced upon them. It seemed he had something new for Eyvel to read every night. The scenes were not entirely in order, but they stood out boldly for Eyvel nonetheless. She now carried in her head the image of Lord Sigurd coming across a girl with hair like silvery moonlight who uttered a few words and then fled, leaving the young noble heartsick. She also was unable to clear from her mind the moment where handsome young Prince Jamke of Verdane was called to Sigurd’s cause by fair Lady Aideen in a scene tense enough Eyvel wasn’t entirely sure either of them would survive it.

“How many suitors does the Lady of Jungby have by this point?” She called this into the kitchen, where Finn was preparing drinks for the evening.

“Three,” came the response. “Not counting the one that tried to carry her off.”

“Right, and he’s dead now. So do any of these young man win her hand?”

“I’m not going to divulge that,” Finn said as he set a cup of pineapple tea before her.

“Well, if you keep writing I guess I’ll keep reading,” she said, and lifted the cup to her lips.

Since the start of the rains they’d consumed all the precious coffee from Darna and Eyvel no longer tried to convince Finn he might someday like chicory; instead they drank the pale golden brew made from a resilient little herb called the pineapple weed. A sprig of it floated in her cup, a lacy bit of leaf with a yellow nub of a flower. Eyvel held it up to the firelight.

“This tea sparked the conversation that led you to confess you’d ever been involved with Lord Sigurd in the first place,” Eyvel said.

Mareeta had gathered the tea and in doing so made a joke that the little yellow flowers of pineapple weed looked nothing like what fell from pine trees, and Finn had commented then that the crushed flowers did indeed have a fragrance similar to that of the true pineapple fruits of Verdane. And then one of the earliest fragments of truth came out, and here she was a decade later trying to absorb the rest of it.

“A faint echo of the Spirit Forest,” he replied, and took a seat next to her on the couch.

“Don’t read over my shoulder like a spy,” she cautioned him, and tipped the book at an angle away from him.

“I wouldn’t,” and a trace of smile let her know that he understood she was only being playful.

He’d settled comfortably against her, all trace of rigid military bearing gone for the moment. Eyvel admired the almost casual way he’d stretched out his long legs— not going quite so far as to place one boot on the coffee table like a local ruffian but coming closer to doing so than she’d ever seen him. Then Tiger jumped into Finn’s lap with a muted squeak and Eyvel returned to the Spirit Forest as captured in the chronicle.

_“I tried to forget you all I could, Sigurd, but love found me still, and I simply could not… I couldn’t bear losing you, and yet… oh, I don’t know what to do.”_

_Her eyes darted from side to side in her distress, and the lashes were like the wings of the moths that flitted beneath the dark canopy of trees at all hours. Lord Sigurd’s fancies themselves flew from wild moths to the plight of a butterfly trapped in a jar out of some childish spite, and he swore to himself that he would open that jar._

_“Deirdre, I certainly don’t know why you’re so afraid of this,” he said, straining to keep his voice as low and soothing as he could despite the churning of his own heart. “If we both feel the same way, then we’ve nothing to fear, do we? I… I love you, Deirdre.”_

_“I must not. I must never…” But yet she was leaning into him, drawn toward him as one bead of quicksilver flows into another, and Sigurd felt that overcome the protests coming from her lips. The words said one thing and her voice, her eyes, the grip of her delicate hands around his told him something else._

_“You can’t give into fear, let that become your fate and let it rule you.” Now, Sigurd didn’t have to struggle with himself to keep his voice low— he could hear the conviction of his heart expressed even in a whisper. He traced a finger along her delicate cheekbone and drew a trembling smile out of her, and then he spoke to Deirdre with lips so close to her own that each breath almost became a kiss. “I’m here for you, now and forever. No matter what happens, I will give everything to protect you. We feel the same way, do we not? There can be nothing to fear as long as we stand by each other.”_

_And with these words, Lord Sigurd of Chalphy coaxed the maiden of the Spirit Forest from the darkness that shielded her into the ruddy light of Verdane’s setting sun._

“Oh, that doesn’t sound ill-omened at all,” Eyvel said as she snapped the volume shut. “Finn, did they truly know one another for the space of a few hours before they ran off together? That’s not some poetic elision on your part?”

“No, that’s precisely how it happened.”

“And are you hinting here that Empress Deirdre knew full well that she carried the Dark Lord’s lineage when she took up with Sigurd?”

“She most certainly did,” he replied. “My mistress Lady Ethlyn knew of it within months of the wedding.”

“And she didn’t have it in her to warn him?”

“Believe me, Eyvel, when I say that had she told him before the ceremony or afterward, it would have made no difference.”

And she believed him, not because he’d known them and she hadn’t, but because despite Finn’s even tone she could feel the good spirits leave him like an ebbing tide. It left behind a sense of emptiness, of heaviness, into which Tiger’s oblivious purr was more grating than pleasant.

“I have an inkling that Sigurd was wrong about fate,” Eyvel said to break the leaden silence. “Still, had she managed to _tell_ him what the problem actually was…”

“Remember she was all of seventeen— almost eighteen, but not quite. Lord Sigurd was not that many years older. Not children, but…”

“No, not children,” she said. Twenty was old enough for Leif to be crowned king, for Nanna to be married, for Mareeta to make her own way in the world.

“Of course it all looks different from where we stand now,” he said, and his head rested heavily upon her shoulder.

“It always does,” she said.

Then again, she didn’t remember being twenty.

**To Be Continued**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In most playthroughs, Deirdre will only make vague protests to Sigurd about their love being impossible. If Sandima, the final boss of Chapter 1, is defeated before Deirdre is recruited in the Spirit Forest, she instead tells him the whole mess about being the heiress of the Dark Lord and how her children have the potential to resurrect the devil. Sigurd marries her anyway. 
> 
> And yes, Finn did leave Orsin, Halvan, and Ronan to stew in jail between Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 of FE5. When the boys are finally rescued by Leif they offer apologies for being useless so apparently the game agrees with this course of action even if it seems a little worthy of being side-eyed.
> 
> Of course, the whole theme of imperfect communication is not the least relevant at all to Eyvel's own relationship with Finn. Nope. Not one bit.


	9. Songs the Minstrel Sang

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Finn's chronicle of the Holy War gets into the wars of Agustria, Eyvel at last gets to "meet" the likes of Raquesis and Lewyn.

Autumn brought the spawning runs along with the rains and Finn would go down to the creek on the overcast mornings and return with the day’s catch. Since he hadn’t taken to farming this pleased Eyvel, and she was glad he had a past-time of sorts beyond writing.

“Fishing with you was one of the things Lord Leif treasured when he was here,” she said while filleting up a fine speckled trout, for it occurred to her now that the prince might never have expressed to Finn how much he enjoyed those outings.

“I’m glad he enjoyed the years of relative quiet we had here. At first I feared he’d be lonely in Fiana without Asvel and his other friends from Tahra.”

That wasn’t quite the response Eyvel wanted, and so she set the fish knife on the sideboard and looked straight at Finn. 

“You realize he had an entire little fantasy where he’d pretend that he was just an ordinary village boy living here with his sisters and that we were his parents?”

“I might have been aware of that… to some extent.”

He was avoiding her gaze again and so Eyvel decided to not ask her next question. Some day, surely, they could grapple together with what every moment of self-denial had cost Finn, but today she presented up a lovely meal of grilled trout and then Finn sequestered himself with his manuscript.

-x-

_“That isn’t our only problem, milady,” said Sir Yves as he rose to his feet. “With Lord Eldigan gone, we must keep a close eye upon Heirhein. After the incident in Verdane, they’ll be eager to take revenge on us… especially Lord Elliot.”_

_“Ugh, that Elliot,” said the princess, and she began to toy with the hilt of her sword. “I cannot believe how many times I’ve had to tell him I’m not interested in him. Conceited swine like that are the worst! If only more men were cut from the same fine cloth as Eldie… and it’s too bad they aren’t, because then I might at least consider a marriage.”_

“This happened?” Eyvel asked. Peering over the edge of the book at Finn with a measure of doubt in her heart was becoming a regular occurrence as she began to truly recognize the characters involved in his tale.

“Yes. The Lady Raquesis swore before a room of witnesses never to marry any man not equal to her lord brother.”

Eyvel shrugged and continued her reading. In truth she’d looked forward to this; the brave young princess of Nordion had been glimpsed a few times in the manuscript, but now she stepped up to the role of a major character. Small of stature, fierce of heart, and none too cautious with her tongue, she evoked Princess Nanna in some way but in others was clearly a rose from a different garden entirely.

_“He might not admit it,” Lord Sigurd said then, “but Raquesis has always been the dearest thing to Eldigan’s heart. There’s no telling what he might do if he lost her.”_

“I see no mention of Lord Eldigan’s wife or his heir. Was he unmarried then?” She knew quite a lot of Eldigan’s son Ares, as King Leif and his queen had played a role in restoring him to Agustria’s throne a few years before and had many tales to share of the exotic western lands.

“He was married with a child by this time, yes.”

“Oh. So some of the things I’ve heard when bards pass through…”

“Are not far from the truth.” 

She noticed he didn’t even bother to ask which things the bards used as fodder for their ballads of forbidden love. Finn had, by this point, likely heard them all.

-x-

The nature of bards and their works turned out to be more relevant than Eyvel suspected, as a comic scene featuring a pair of disgruntled mercenaries in service to a dishonest lord of western Agustria gave way to a vignette of a young bard holed up in a rustic village imperiled by that very lord’s actions.

_“That’s it. That guy’s gotta go. I’ll sort him out, okay?” Lewyn arranged the tassels of his scarf, then glanced back over his shoulder at the shire-reeve. “Now, how big a reward’ll be waiting for me when I get back?”_

_“Still full of talk, are you? Get outta here, wise guy,” came the shire-reeve’s response. “Nobody here has time to listen to you blowing your own horn.”_

_“Oh, come on. A little confidence would be nice.” Neither the shire-reeve nor the villagers around him returned his smile. “Ah, whatever.”_

_This time Lewyn fully intended to depart, but a voice issuing from the back of the crowd caused the young bard to freeze in place, one foot poised above the earth._

_“Oi! Lewyn! Runnin’ off when my back’s turned, are you?”_

“Oh, Lewyn.” 

Eyvel knew him in fragments that made no sense— royal father of King Leif’s comrade Prince Ced, the shadowy presence behind Leif’s tactician August and more directly the mind that guided Emperor Seliph to his victories. Yet she’d also heard of Lewyn the absent father, the neglectful husband, the runaway king— a man who returned again and again to the guise of a traveling bard to escape his duties. 

“If he’s a bard, why hasn’t he put this whole saga to verse himself?” she asked now. “He has plenty of time on his hands with the wars done.”

“As I understand it, he left the continent entirely years ago,” Finn replied.

“Running away so far even his children can’t find him?”

“Going home, perhaps.”

“Am I going to have to read the entirety of your account for that to make any sense?” For Eyvel knew that Lewyn’s home was the snowy land of Silesse, not some other continent entirely. “Never mind. I think you like spinning your mysteries with me.”

“Would you find the mysteries easier to take if I borrowed a page from Lewyn and played dress-up for the duration of the performance?”

“I don’t think a bard’s costume would suit you in the least,” Eyvel said, though in truth it took a moment for her to discern that Finn was actually joking. Reading his chronicle had taught Eyvel that Finn had a more developed sense of humor than one might guess from simply being in his company— both on the “high” end of satire and dramatic irony that might be expected from an educated man and the “low” end that showed up in the earthy interactions of villagers and mercenaries— and in the antics of Lewyn the bard and his companion the dancing girl. 

-x-

“So was Lewyn any good at being a bard?”

This was a “four in the morning” question, an idle thought when they were too aroused for sleep and not yet ready for the dawn.

“Good? His skill was second to none. He could play any instrument set before him, perform any piece of music after hearing it but once. Imagine the finest musician you’ve ever seen and then imagine a level beyond. That was Lewyn when he played— transcendent.”

“Beyond the capabilities of an ordinary man?”

“For certain,” said Finn, and from the reverence in his voice, Eyvel wished she could’ve heard those performances, could have stood in the presence of something genuinely divine and felt the vibrations of that transcendent music through her body.

Sometimes she did envy Finn for everything he’d been through that he couldn’t forget. Sometimes.

“Is that part of his bloodline, then? I hadn’t heard young Ced was much of an artist.”

“I believe it was how the Wind God decided to manifest in Lewyn, yes. But I’d rather not talk about him any more right now,” Finn said, and he began to re-arrange the covers, enveloping them both in a soft cocoon to block out the world just a little longer.

“I’ll ask about you, then,” Eyvel said, for her wits were too alert to easily succumb yet to the warmth of their bed. “If Lewyn decided in his early days to play at being a bard, when did you first imagine it was your calling to write?”

“You might say I come by writing honestly,” Finn replied, a drowsy wistfulness coloring the words. “My grandfather Earl Padraig was a poet of some renown.”

“Was he?”

“Yes. He composed ‘The Highwayman’ and “The River’s Lament.’”

“You’re kidding,” Eyvel said, though she knew all too well he wasn’t. She remembered teaching Mareeta “The Highwayman,” a murky tale of doomed romance in a lawless Thracia supposedly set in the era of King Dain’s successor that in truth resembled the Thracia they knew from life. “Were you close to your grandfather?”

“Not at all,” said Finn, the sweet wistful note gone from his voice. “He was kind, but I wasn't much consolation to him in his final years. His only son died in a pointless skirmish at the border, and that left my mother his heiress. Mother was brave and clever, and she’d been a bow knight before she married my father, so Grandfather was pleased enough to leave the estates to her. But then she died, and I was all he had left.”

“Mm.” That sounded a crushing string of losses, to be sure, but it didn’t excuse neglecting a small child.

“He once told me if I’d been a pretty little girl then I’d have been married to Prince Quan and all our estates could be folded into the royal lands and so been kept secure, but because I was a frail little boy the instant he died every vulture in Leonster would descend on our lands and I’d be lucky to keep a roof over my head.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say to a child,” Eyvel said, feeling such a dislike for Earl Padraig in that moment that she felt it would alter her view of his poems henceforth.

“It was accurate,” said Finn. “Fortunately the royal family agreed to take me on as a ward and Queen Alfiona came to collect me after my grandfather did pass away.”

“Thank the gods for mercy,” said Eyvel. “But then, as your grandfather’s heir… you’d have received substantial estates in Leonster, at least when you came of age.”

“Mmm… yes.” In this “yes” Eyvel heard the ring of some tangled story compressed into one syllable.

“Earl of?” she prompted him.

“Duke of Leonster.”

“The entire territory?” For the former independent kingdoms of Thracia were duchies of Leif’s kingdom now, something Eyvel had memorized because it affected the addresses on the mail she gave to the Royal Post.

“I received some additional honors over the years.”

Eyvel untangled herself from the blankets and stared at Finn as hard as she could in the pre-dawn gloom.

“My lord duke, what in the world are you doing here in Fiana when you have responsibilities to your vassals?”

“I have a daughter who is capable of managing the estates,” he replied, and rolled over on his side to indicate his utter lack of contrition with regard to his vassals. “She has as much experience as I ever did; it’s not as though I ever personally saw to them.”

This satisfied Eyvel not in the least, and for several minutes she watched Finn as he pretended to sleep. 

“Why have you turned your back on the union you fought to create for so very long?”

“The world we created is one where I have no place,” he said, as calmly as he’d recounted the sad facts of his childhood. As easily as he’d tell her the fishing conditions down at the creek.

And with this, he fell into a genuine sleep, plainly untroubled by his conscience on this particular point. Eyvel eventually settled in next to him, and eventually her own troubled thoughts gave way to some dreams that dissolved in the late-blooming winter dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Project Naga patch has seen release since I last updated (2015 & 2016 were bad, sorry) and I have decided at last to embrace the spelling of "Bridget" when applicable.
> 
> Also, Bridget assumes the "daughter" Finn refers to must be Nanna. She isn't.

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in a timeline that assumes Lewyn/Fury, Beowulf/Raquesis, and Finn/Bridget along with Leif/Nanna and Orsin/Tanya.
> 
> The book titles are references to real-world things, a Renaissance allegory and The Name of the Rose respectively.


End file.
